On the Laravel News site they've spotlighted a tool that can be useful to make working with regular expressions simpler: Simple Regex Language.

Simple Regex Language is a new PHP package that aims to simplify regular expressions using a cleaner written word approach to the syntax.

They provide examples of email address validation both with the "language" the library provides, what it evaluates too and a more "PHP way" of doing it with objects if you're so inclined. You can find out more about the library either from the project website or looking at the code directly on GitHub. You can also find a discussion of the library and some options shared around it in this post on the /r/php subreddit on Reddit.com.